Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60005. Dragons in Scripture turn up more often than most readers realise, and the question of whether anything real stands behind them is not as silly as it sounds. Every continent has dragon stories, and cultures with no contact produced descriptions with striking family resemblances. I am going to take the question seriously without…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60004. Looking for dinosaurs in Scripture is one of the first things a curious child does once they discover that the Bible starts with animals and that their favourite creature seems to be missing. It is a fair question, and it deserves better than a nervous change of subject. The short answer is that…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 08127. Whether Satan required permission to attack Job’s children is not a puzzle for the study, because anybody who has buried someone they love and then read Job 1 knows exactly how sharp it is. The text plainly shows Satan seeking and receiving permission to attack, and ten young people die within a few…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 6058. Is all suffering a result of personal sin? No, and Scripture says so with unusual force. This is one of the few questions where the Bible hands us an entire book to make sure we do not get it wrong. The instinct to trace every affliction back to personal sin runs deep in…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6057. The relationship between sin and suffering is one of the first questions people ask me when life caves in, and it is usually asked in a whisper. Something has gone badly wrong and the sufferer wants to know whether they brought it on themselves. I want to answer that carefully, because Scripture does…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6016. The suffering of Job is the passage everyone reaches for when life collapses, and it is also the book most often misused. People quote the patience of Job at those who are anything but patient, and they quote the ending at people who are nowhere near it. Let me try to read it…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6011. Does God cause suffering, or does He only allow it? I have stood at enough hospital beds and gravesides to know this is never an academic question. How you answer it shapes whether you can trust God on the worst day of your life. If He directly causes every agony, He begins to…